How to Make Money with Affiliate Marketing for Beginners

Looking for an ultimate guide to affiliate marketing for beginners in 2024? Want to know how to make HUGE amount of money with affiliate marketing? This guide is exclusively for you.

Last year alone, my blog BloggersPassion generated around $160,000 in revenue (check out some of the interesting stuff in my blog income reports).

Not just that, my blog has been earning $10,000+ per month for several years.

The best part? Most of that income comes from affiliate marketing.

As AI technology progresses, more and more people are exploring affiliate marketing as a top choice for making money through AI.

So if you’re someone who is new to affiliate marketing and looking to earn $10K+ per month from it, this guide is just for you.

First things first: Affiliate marketing isn’t a BIG deal if you know how to sell. Anyone who knows “how to sell” can earn more money from it.

The major reason most people don’t make even a buck from affiliate marketing is this: they sell products directly to their audience without knowing their needs and wants.

What happens when you directly sell online products like that? No one buys from you. It’s as simple as that.

Once you understand that simple logic, you’ll be earning HUGE.

Have a look at some of my earning reports so you’ll understand the potential of affiliate marketing.

Semrush earning reports

If you’re following our blog BloggersPassion for a while, you might be already familiar with our Semrush earnings. We are one of the top affiliate earning partners for Semrush.

Have a look at the earning reports of Semrush.

semrush payoutssemrush payouts
semrush affiliate earnings via BeRushsemrush affiliate earnings via BeRush

The above earning report is from Semrush (total earnings so far with Semrush is over $459,000!!!).

Impact Affiliate Earnings

Sharing how much we received in our Impact account in 2023 (all affiliate revenue).

Impact affiliate revenue in 2023Impact affiliate revenue in 2023

How much we received in PayPal?

Sharing how much we received in PayPal account in 2023 (all affiliate revenue).

PayPal BP Revenue 2023PayPal BP Revenue 2023

So we received over $81,600 in PayPal account in 2023.

Also, we made decent sales from our preferred hosting choice i.e WPX Hosting.

wpx affiliate totalwpx affiliate total

As you can see above reports, you’ll notice that we earned HUGE commissions from affiliate products. So yes, if I can make it, you can also do the same.

The reason to publish this guide is to help you earn more from affiliate marketing. So without much ado, let’s get into the details.

What is affiliate marketing and how does it work?

Affiliate marketing is the process of earning a commission by promoting other products.

You earn a commission for every successful sale you make. It is one of the best ways to make passive income online. That means, you make profits even while you sleep, isn’t it a great idea?

So how does it work?

Here’s a simple explanation for you.

  • You find an amazing product that offers an affiliate program
  • You send your website visitors to that affiliate program using your special tracking link (which is also known as affiliate referral link)
  • If your website visitor ends up buying the product you referred to, you get a commission on the sale (your commission depends on the products you promote)

Here’s a great illustration that explains more about how it works.

how affiliate marketing workshow affiliate marketing works

Affiliate marketing is also growing rapidly. Did you know that affiliate marketing is a HUGE 12 billion dollar industry? It also accounts for 15% of all digital media revenue. Yes, you heard it right.

Here are some more interesting stats around affiliate marketing.

  • Awin affiliates earned over $700 million last year (Awin was acquired by ShareASale network)
  • 81% of brands rely on affiliate programs
  • More than 50% of affiliate-referred traffic comes from mobile devices
  • Jason Stone (also known as Millionaire Mentor) made $7 million in affiliate marketing revenue in a single year

So yes, there’s enough potential in affiliate marketing that lets anyone make enough passive income. That said, the first step to making money from affiliate marketing is to build a BRAND.

When you are featuring everywhere in the blogosphere, people will trust you and they recognize you as an expert in your field.

That’s how you can build an online reputation as a blogger or Internet marketer. The more people talking about you and your business, the better it is for you to make money out of it.

So if you want to learn about earning $10,000 and more per month from affiliate marketing, here are 15 PROVEN strategies for you. Even if you’re a beginner you can use the following ways to start earning more money.

Let’s get started. Grab a cup of coffee because this guide is going to be a HUGE resource.

Quick note: If you need any help with affiliate marketing, make sure to mail me at [email protected] and I’d be glad to help you 🙂

Affiliate Marketing for Beginners in 2024: 15 PROVEN Ways to Earn $10K Per Month from Affiliate Marketing

affiliate marketing for beginners 2024affiliate marketing for beginners 2024

1. Use the psychology of FREE!

People love freebies. Facebook is free. Google is free. Gmail is free. WhatsApp is free.

Almost every billion-dollar online business is FREE to use.

FREE is powerful.

Netflix is a billion-dollar online movie streaming platform. Do you know why they offer a 30-day free trial to its users?

Because they know that the psychology of free works like a charm. It entices new users to try their platform for a few weeks without risking anything. If they’re happy, they’ll continue using it or they’ll cancel their account.

So Netflix has NOTHING to lose and everything to gain.

Learn the psychology of free from other successful businesses so you can easily 10x your affiliate earnings.

Here are some of the practical ways to use the power of “FREE” to get more sales.

Run giveaways

Giveaways work like a charm and they easily go viral on social media sites.

If you want to get more visitors or subscribers, think about doing a giveaway around the products you like (make sure they are relevant to your website topics, so you can only attract the target audience instead of freebie seekers).

Here’s a great example of how giveaways always go viral online.

giveaway importancegiveaway importance

Provide special deals

Why should someone buy from you instead of your competitors? What’s unique about you? The reason we’re earning HUGE from Semrush is that we offer special deals like 30-day free trials (Semrush usually offers 7-day free trials).

So obviously people who’re interested in Semrush tend to prefer 30-day free trials over 7-day free trials on any day. Not just that, we also create excellent tutorials and content around Semrush which help us with more revenue from Semrush.

So what’s the bottom line? Try to find ways to offer some special deals on specific affiliate products you promote if you want to boost your commissions.

Create freebies

Freebies such as whitepapers, cheatsheets, eBooks etc work like a charm to convert your website visitors into subscribers and buyers. In fact, we also provide freebies ranging from eBooks to courses.

You can check out our FREE courses page to get some ideas on how to craft freebies for your website audience.

free bp coursesfree bp courses

Here are some of the freebies we’re currently offering to our blog audience.

So go ahead and start offering FREE stuff to your audience. Make sure your freebies are worth paying for. Don’t provide useless content just because you’re offering something for free.

Loving this affiliate marketing for beginners guide? Please consider sharing it with others 🙂

2. Pick the RIGHT products

Your online success depends on the products you choose to promote.

Picking the right affiliate products to promote is the key to generating more affiliate commission no matter what industry you are in.

So if you’re just getting started with affiliate based marketing, how are you going to find the best products that are suitable for your target audience?

Here are some powerful ways to choose great products to promote as an affiliate marketer.

Create a list of products to promote

Create a spreadsheet and make a list of all of your competitors’ websites. The higher number of sites the better it is for you to find great products to promote. Make sure your competitors’ list is at least 20 to 30 sites.

Once you’re done with it, start finding all the affiliate products your competitors promote on their sites. Yes, just do it.

Then, make a list of all the potential products that you think are suitable for your target audience. Brainstorm all the products that you’re already using to run your blog (hosting, email marketing software, domain registrar, and so on), then find out ways to promote those products to your target audience.

You can also use marketing platforms for finding a ton of products to promote on your affiliate based website. Here are a few of them where you can sign up for free.

  • ShareASale
  • Commission Junction
  • ClickBank
  • Amazon associates
  • eBay etc
affiliate networksaffiliate networks

The above simple exercise is enough for you to choose a ton of great affiliate products that you can promote on your website to make more commissions.

That being said, here are a few tips for finding the best products for affiliate promotion.

  • The first thing you need to remember for successful affiliate product selection is NOT to pick too many products at once. It’s better to choose 2 to 3 products when you’re just starting so you can get a better idea about what they are all about including their pros and cons so you can promote them more effectively to your blog audience.
  • Before you pick a product to promote, make sure to start using it so you’ll get a sight of their features and benefits. This is especially true when it comes to promoting internet marketing products.
  • Consider high price products. The more we get into marketing, the more we’re realising the importance of promoting high priced products. Not only do they give you a huge commission per sale but most of the high priced products usually offer top-notch features so they can be sold out in almost any industry.

3. Create an effective content strategy

You must know how successful affiliate marketers are making millions of dollars every single year.

If you observe top marketers, you’ll notice one thing too often: they all create incredibly amazing content.

Content is one of the most important pillars of building a successful site that generates more sales each week.

Here are a few of the content types that you can use to drive more affiliate sales to your sites in 2024.

  • Product reviews
  • Detailed case studies around your affiliate products
  • Affiliate product comparisons
  • Informative video tutorials about the products you promote
  • Webinars
  • Long-form of how-to articles
  • Roundup posts

Let’s talk about each one of them in detail now so you can better understand how these content types help you increase your overall affiliate sales.

In-depth how-to posts

Google always rewards sites that produce long-form content. Even if you’re running a website, you can still use long-form in-depth how-to articles around your affiliate products to start getting higher rankings on Google search.

Here’s an example post of how we wrote a detailed case study of Semrush (one of the few products that we promote here at BloggersPassion regularly).

Have a look at the following screenshot to see how Google treats the long-form of how-to articles even if they are product-based content.

case study semrushcase study semrush

The above illustration shows you that Google is also showing us the SiteLinks for the case study we wrote for the affiliate product which is Semrush.

READ  5 Must-Read Affiliate Marketing Books for Beginners in 2024

Product reviews

Creating useful reviews around the products you promote is probably one of the most effective content types you can use to generate more affiliate sales. Almost every affiliate marketer creates product reviews to increase their commissions.

Just pick the product that you want to write a review about. Use it for some time so you will get an idea about its features, pros, cons, and write everything you know about those products.

Here’s a nice example of writing unbiased product reviews to drive more affiliate sales. And here’s a great example of how to write captivating titles for reviews.

review tipsreview tips

The key to using product reviews to generate more sales is to make them unbiased. Don’t promote a product just for the sake of increasing your commissions, do it because you want to help your audience to pick the RIGHT products that solve their problems. That way you can easily convince more people to buy products from you instead of your competition.

Read: Ways to Get Free Products for Review: 5 Effortless Techniques for 2024

Roundup posts

Have you ever seen the most successful affiliate website Wirecutter? It’s a product review based website that was sold to The New York Times recently for a whopping sum of over $30 million.

Wirecutter website mostly publishes list roundups where they create a compilation of a list of products their audience can pick (by including their affiliate referral links within them). Here’s an example of a roundup post around email marketing.

roundup postsroundup posts

As you can see above, we asked over 45 experts to share their best strategy and we also smartly included affiliate links to some of their recommended products.

Affiliate product comparisons

Just like product reviews, product comparisons work like a charm too. You just need to find two or more highly relevant affiliate products to create product comparison posts that easily go viral online and help you increase your affiliate sales.

If you’re looking for an example, have a look at this Moz vs Semrush comparison post so you can get a good understanding of how to create comparison posts for your affiliate products.

moz vs semrush illustrationmoz vs semrush illustration

In the above illustration, you can see that we compared two of the amazing and highly relevant affiliate products along with their features and pricing (we also included a strong call to action).

Video tutorials

Yes, we all know the textual format of content and product reviews work well both in terms of increasing your search traffic and sales. But if you’re ignoring the second biggest search engine like YouTube for affiliate marketing, you’re missing a lot of potential traffic and sales to your affiliate website.

Create informative video tutorials about the products you promote so you can include them within your blog posts as well (or attract a new set of visitors from YouTube). Video product reviews convert well as they are easy to digest and you can include all your affiliate links within your video description.

Here’s a video product review we did for WPX Hosting.

Webinars

You can’t succeed online if you’re following the crowd. If your competitors are using articles to promote their affiliate products, you start doing webinars. That way you can add more value to your audience by also promoting your products with ease.

Promoting your products through webinars has the following benefits.

  • Webinars have the highest conversion rates (that means the people who watch your webinars are most likely to purchase from you)
  • Webinars allow you to easily educate your audience about the products you promote
  • Webinars help you establish yourself as an expert in your industry

So what are you waiting for? Start using the above PROVEN content types to increase your affiliate sales.

4. Build an email list from day 1

Did you know that most of the successful bloggers earn 70 to 80% of their income from their email list?

Yes, that’s true. Successful marketers like Ramit Sethi, Pat Flynn, Neil Patel drive most of their sales and profits from their email lists.

If you are someone who is looking to dive into affiliate marketing to make more sales in 2024 and beyond, your priority should be building an email list and growing it. Without building an email list it’s almost impossible for you to turn your website visitors into leads and then leads into sales.

An email list is what permits you to market your products to a list of targeted people who are interested in buying your products.

So you can say an email list works like a money printing machine (not exactly though, you’ve to work hard for it). Did you know that email gives you a whopping $40 ROI per every $1 you spend?

Email-ROIEmail-ROI

Email marketing gives you the highest ROI!

That being said here are some of the proven ways to build an amazing email list which helps you increase your affiliate sales no matter what industry you are in.

  • Offer an incentive or a freebie such as ebooks, videos, plugins, themes, or anything that is considered as a valuable source for your target audience in your industry.
  • Use the right email marketing software to automate your email newsletters so you can send automatic broadcasting emails to your subscribers as soon as they join your email list. This is also one of the most effective ways to build rapport with your email subscribers.
  • Place your email opt-in forms at the right places on your website. You can include them on the sidebar, notification bar, footer, about us page, and within your blog posts to turn more visitors into subscribers.

5. Learn how to generate more traffic to your blog and keep it there

More visitors = more revenue

Website traffic is the currency online.

There are literally infinite ways available online to generate traffic to a blog or website.

But still… most affiliate marketers struggle to bring more visitors to their site.

Whether you agree with it or not, website traffic is the lifeblood for any profitable affiliate website. If you’re not getting enough traffic, it’s impossible to earn a living from affiliate marketing.

So how can you generate more traffic to your blog? Here are some time-tested ways to drive traffic to your sites.

Answer on Quora

Quora is an amazing platform for online creators such as affiliate marketers and bloggers.

We already crossed over six million in views from our Quora answers.

Have a look;

quora statsquora stats

If used it right, you can get amazing benefits from Quora including;

  • Driving high quality visitors to your site
  • It helps you with affiliate sales as well (we made a couple of affiliate sales, just don’t include affiliate links within your answers directly)
  • It helps you build and grow your online brand
  • It helps you connect with awesome people in your industry and the list goes on

The best way to get more out of Quora is to find the RIGHT questions to answer. Make sure to write answers on Quora regularly so you can start building a following. Don’t spam. Don’t link to your affiliate products and DO NOT plagiarise. Otherwise, you’ll get banned!

Important: If you’re looking for a detailed guide, please refer to how to increase traffic with the Quora guide where you can find a ton of useful stuff along with practical examples.

Read: 40+ Quora Statistics that Will Surprise You in 2024

Repurpose your articles

Repurposing your content is the best way to get more exposure to your content. If you’re already spending a ton of time to create great content, you should definitely repurpose your content.

If you’re into affiliate marketing and looking for long-term success, you should “be everywhere”. Take Pat Flynn from Smart Passive Income for example. He’s everywhere. He’s doing podcasts. He creates videos. He publishes articles on his blog. He runs a Facebook group.

He always repurposes his content into multiple formats such as eBooks, videos, infographics etc. You should also try the same if you want to get more out of affiliate marketing.

Here are some of the ways you can repurpose your articles.

  • Infographics
  • Podcasts
  • PDFs
  • Illustrations
  • Videos
  • Slideshows

Create videos on YouTube

YouTube is the second biggest search engine after Google. No matter what niche you are in, if you want to get ahead in affiliate marketing, you should try YouTube video marketing.

Create videos, tutorials and product reviews. Learn how to optimize your YouTube videos for higher rankings. Learn how to monetize your videos with affiliate products.

Although I’m late to YouTube video marketing but I’m consistently working hard to make better videos on my channel. If you’re interested in affiliate marketing and SEO, you can subscribe to my YouTube channel.

Here’s a quick tip for you to create better performing videos on YouTube: Create DETAILED videos.

Did you know that longer videos (more than 15 minutes) outperformed shorter videos in YouTube search?

longer videos seolonger videos seo

As you can see above, according to Backlinko case study, if your video length is more than 15 minutes, your YouTube videos will rank higher. So give it a try!

Update your old content

Updating your old blog posts is one of the most underrated SEO techniques. Most new bloggers and online creators keep pushing new contents on their blogs but they often ignore their old content.

Don’t make that mistake. Find your top performing blog posts from Google Analytics and make sure to update them with high-quality and up-to-date information.

Also, find all those old contents that are not bringing you any traffic (or less traffic) and find better keywords, optimize them with better content and build some links to grow their traffic.

6. Promote your affiliate products the right way

Selecting the best products to promote is one thing and promoting them effectively to reach a wider target audience is another thing. Your affiliate sales majorly depend on your promotion tactics.

Here are a few top ways you can promote your affiliate products effectively to increase sales.

  • Create a “Tools we use” page: One of the easiest ways to promote your affiliate products is to create a resource or “tools we use” page and send your website visitors to those pages. Just make sure to include a list of all the affiliate tools that you use and recommend (along with your affiliate referral links).
  • Create an email sequence for your best products: If you’re already building an email list, create an exclusive email sequence (5 part or 7 part email sequence) where you can educate your email subscribers about your best-performing products.
  • Make full use of Black Friday season: Black Friday season comes only once a year which lasts usually for a week in November. That’s the time where most affiliate product vendors offer up to 90% discount on their products.
  • Create income reports: Pat Flynn’s blog is famous for income reports. He publishes his earning reports every single month sharing all his traffic sources along with his income sources. People love to read, comment, and share these kinds of posts (even we love them and we usually publish income reports once in a year).
READ  Affiliate marketing vs Google Adsense: [With Earning Proofs]

7. Build relationships with other affiliate marketers and bloggers

It doesn’t matter what niche you are in, you should network with other bloggers and affiliate marketers. Why? Networking helps you with the following things.

  • It helps you gain more knowledge
  • It helps you generate more traffic, build links, social shares etc
  • Networking with others can work like a win/win approach as you can help each other out
  • And the list goes on

So how can you build relationships with others? Here are some of the best platforms you can use to network with others.

Facebook groups

Hands down, Facebook is the best social media network to connect with other bloggers. Fortunately, there are a ton of groups on Facebook that you can join to interact with others.

You can ask questions, share your knowledge, frequently interact with other bloggers through Facebook groups. Make sure to join only those Facebook groups where you see an active engagement.

Don’t share your links or try to promote your stuff as no one likes spam. Instead, try to add as much value as you can.

You can get started by joining our BloggersPassion VIP group as we have an amazing community of over 21,000 people who’re interested in blogging, SEO and affiliate marketing related stuff.

BloggersPassion VIP groupBloggersPassion VIP group

The benefit of running a Facebook group is you often get better engagement whenever you promote a product or blog post.

Reddit

Reddit is another popular platform for bloggers and Internet marketers. Reddit allows users to discuss and vote on content that other users have submitted (such as likes on Facebook).

You can also find a wide range of topics including from marketing to SEO to blogging and more where you can follow topics to find the best information on the web. You can also reply to others questions or create new posts or questions to engage with your audience.

Blogging forums

Online communities and forums are great places to hang out online. You’ll not only be able to learn amazing stuff but you can also ask questions or share your blog to generate more traffic.

Here are some of the best FREE blogging forums that are extremely useful for affiliate marketing for beginners in 2024.

warrior forumwarrior forum

You can also subscribe to other YouTube channels in your niche and start sharing and commenting on their videos as it helps you build better connections with others.

8. Grow your affiliate commissions like a PRO

Getting your first affiliate sale feels amazing.

But you shouldn’t stop there. You need to set smart goals something like;

  • Getting to your first 100 affiliate sales
  • Getting to your first 250 affiliate sales
  • Getting to your first 500 affiliate sales
  • Getting to your first 1000 affiliate sales and so on

The only way to succeed as an affiliate marketer is to scale up your earnings and keep growing big in sales and commissions. That’s how an average affiliate marketer becomes a super affiliate marketer.

If you’re wondering about how to scale up your affiliate commissions from a pitiful of sales to a ton of affiliate sales each week, here are few affiliate marketing for beginners strategies you can use.

  • Listen to your target audience’s needs and wants. Most successful marketers are successful because of one reason: they LISTEN to their customers. If you want to increase your affiliate sales, you must find out what your target audience truly wants.
  • Spy on your competitors’ tactics. The best place to increase your affiliate sales is to find out what different tactics your competitors are using on their websites to boost their affiliate sales.
  • Keep learning. Most people stop learning once they start getting a decent affiliate commission. You shouldn’t stop. Your growth starts when you start learning more. You can read marketing, psychology, and business-related books to find out your audience’s pulse.
  • Use your analytics data to your advantage. The more you learn about how you’re getting sales, the better you’ll understand about increasing them.

9. Optimize your website for high affiliate commissions

Optimizing your website for more affiliate sales is as important as promoting your affiliate products.

Here are some of the most effective ways you can optimize your website for more sales.

Use landing pages

Landing pages convert like a charm when it comes to increasing your overall website conversion rates and sales.

Landing pages give less distraction to your website target audience (because they often include just one or two calls to actions). Here’s a great illustration of how to build landing pages for high conversions.

landing page tipslanding page tips

Don’t tell them to buy, RECOMMEND!

Do you know the ONE secret that successful affiliate marketer Pat Flynn uses on his blogs to create more income from his affiliate sales?

It is.. he never asks his readers to buy his affiliate products, he just recommends it by telling how the particular product helped his business, this way he can be able to generate more money because he is not being fishy.

Moreover, he is building trust in his readers by making them aware of the products that he promotes.

For example, Pat Flynn never directly asks his readers about purchasing Bluehost (one of the best hosting services). But he makes them buy by creating a 4-minute WordPress free setup guide by creating video, writing articles, and using banner ads.

This is how he can generate a whopping sum of $30k every month only through Bluehost!

pat flynnpat flynn

What’s in it for them if they buy from you?

This is another important aspect of selling more products from your affiliate campaign – always ask yourself this question “what’s in for them to buy my products?”.

When you give people strong reasons to buy your products and when they find it more useful to buy from you than anyone else, your affiliate sales can go viral.

But how can you do it?

A little trick is to create premium products on your blogs and give them for free whoever buys stuff through your affiliate links!

For example, if you have a $37 eBook guide (which you sell to your blog visitors), you can give it away for FREE for those who buy hosting from your affiliate link.

Using a strong call to action

The difference between a successful affiliate marketer and a newbie is the call to action. Call to actions (CTA) are most powerful when it comes to increasing your website sales online.

cta examplescta examples

Here are some of the powerful call to actions you can use while creating your copy, designing your landing pages, or creating product reviews.

  • Grab the deal now
  • Get instant discount
  • Use this special code
  • Click here to activate the deal
  • And so on

Just make sure to keep an eye on the CTA’s that your competitors are using to increase their affiliate sales.

10. The importance of SEO

Ask any affiliate marketer about their favorite website traffic source and most of them will say search engines. That’s the importance of search engine traffic in driving more sales to your sites.

SEO is one of the most effective and FREE ways to attract highly qualified visitors from search engines like Google to increase your overall affiliate sales and commissions.

Here’s how SEO can help with your sales;

  • By getting first page rankings for the product reviews, you can generate a ton of sales automatically
  • By attracting more people from search engines, you can easily boost your website conversion rates
  • By using SEO, you can easily build and grow an email list which you can later use for building rapport with your audience to increase your affiliate sales.

Have a look at the following image to know the importance of SEO and long-tail keywords.

keyword research importancekeyword research importance

So how can you use SEO to increase your overall affiliate sales?

Here are some of the smart SEO tips for affiliate marketers to grow their organic traffic along with affiliate sales.

  • Create a solid keyword strategy. SEO without keyword research is useless and it’s especially true for affiliate websites. Using the right keywords that your audience is typing on Google is the fastest way to increase your traffic.
  • Always optimize your URLs by keeping search engines in mind. Don’t use lengthy URLs if you want to optimize better and get more search engine traffic to your sites. Smart and short URLs always work like a charm.
  • Start showing product review boxes. If you’re using a WordPress platform, there’s a plugin called WP Review Pro which helps you easily optimize your affiliate product reviews.

11. Competitor research is the KEY

What’s the one thing most industries have in common? Competition. Yes, almost every industry has a certain amount of competitors and if you find a niche without any competition, you shouldn’t probably pick that.

That being said, if you want to make more bucks from affiliate marketing, you should analyze your competition thoroughly. Here are some of the best ways you can do that to grow your affiliate sales.

  • Find out your competitors’ ad copies. If your industry is filled with enough competition, most of them are probably using ads on Google to drive more traffic to their sites.
  • Find what keywords your competitors are using to generate more traffic to their sites from search engines like Google.
  • Find out the backlink sources of your competitors so you can also find ways to attract more links to your site which will help you increase your organic traffic and sales.

Here’s a great video by Neil Patel on how to do organic research with ease (which helps you in competitor research as well).

12. Do NOT make these mistakes as an affiliate marketing beginner

Here are some of the dumbest online marketing mistakes most people make, avoid them and you’ll be on your way to getting rich online.

Mistake 1: Not investing in anything

One of the most common mistakes we notice that most new affiliate marketers do is this: they NEVER spend any money on their website.

If you want to make more money from blogging, you should be investing first.

  • You need a proper website design (premium WordPress themes cost you a couple of dollars and it is a must)
  • You need a faster, safer and reliable hosting (another expense)
  • You need to get access to the RIGHT tools (they can be email marketing software, SEO tools, etc)

Mistake 2: It is NOT a get rich quick scheme

The ugly side of making money online, especially from affiliate marketing is that most people think it as a get rich quick scheme. If you’re also one among them, you should be aware of the fact that it is NOT.

Building a successful marketing website that makes consistent sales takes a lot of time and effort. You can’t simply make people buy stuff from you out of thin air. You have to work hard to get your first few sales.

That being said, you’ll earn a lot more commission when you find and promote products that give you recurring commissions.

That means, you won’t just get a commission for one time but you’ll be getting recurring commissions every single month as long as the customer is paying for the products you promote.

READ  How to Earn Extra Money With Online Focus Groups

Mistake 3: You don’t know how to sell anything online

This is NOT a mistake though. Selling has more to do with learning. If you learn how to sell online, you’ll be successful no matter what industry you are in.

The reason why the majority of people don’t make many sales with affiliate marketing is that they don’t know how to sell online. If you’re also one among them, you should realize the fact that selling is also a skill that you can develop and master.

You can read books on marketing and psychology or listen to podcasts from successful affiliate marketers like Pat Flynn so you can learn so much about selling online without sounding like a salesman.

Mistake 4: Lack of patience

This is similar to mistake #2 but slightly different. You need to know a simple fact that most affiliate marketers take at least 6 to 8 months to start getting more sales to their affiliate products (even if they are very good at selling and promoting their products). This gives you an idea about how much you should wait until you start considering quitting.

Read: Most Common Affiliate Marketing Mistakes And How to Avoid Them

13. Improve your brand to boost your affiliate sales

Affiliate marketing is not just about being an anonymous guy on the net and hoping for millions of dollars each year.

It doesn’t work anymore. You’ve to build a personal brand and set yourself like an expert in your industry.

Here are a few affiliate marketing for beginners tips to improve your brand which in turn helps you boost your affiliate sales.

  • Produce long-form content: We can’t tell you how important long form content is. Not only does it rank well on Google but also it helps you establish yourself as a thought leader in your industry.
  • Start vlogging and share your personal stories: Most affiliate marketers don’t share their personal lives which we think is essential to set yourself as an expert and people easily get connected to personal stories.
  • Start a podcast: This is one of the super-fast ways to boost your brand as most people are afraid of doing podcasts. Start interviewing other bloggers in your industry, start small, and grow big.

Build credibility by creating videos

“Credibility is essential in online businesses. Without online credibility, you can’t make enough money”

Most people don’t make big bucks through marketing just because their system works in the old fashioned way. That is:

  • They create tons of content (which is actually of no use!)
  • Drive ‘untargeted traffic’ (which is useless)
  • Then they try to monetize their traffic (by promoting every kind of affiliate program)

And they expect great results from their marketing campaigns.

Then what should be your primary goal to make more money out of it? What is the unique affiliate profit model then? Here is how it goes.

  • Find out specific audience and create content for them
  • Drive targeted traffic either through paid ads or free traffic such as organic traffic, social media traffic
  • Promoting the RIGHT products to their targeted audience via email marketing or their blogs
  • Creating VIDEOS to make their audience aware of their products (giving personal touch by creating head-to-head videos you can build credibility and also you can boost your affiliate sales)

Did you know that “promoting a product by releasing a video about its features and benefits can boost affiliate sales to 70%”? So try to create videos at least on a few of your targeted products that sell more.

Never underestimate the power of social media as it can help you easily increase your brand along with traffic and sales to your sites. Instead of picking too many platforms at a time, pick one or two. Start growing your audience and engage with to boost your personal brand.

14. Create a REVENUE plan

“A goal without a plan is just a wish.”

Do you have a revenue plan for your affiliate website?

Where do you want to see yourself after 3 months, 6 months and 12 months?

How much money are you going to make after 1 year from your website? Make sure to create a monetization plan for your affiliate website.

Analyze your competitors and find out how they are promoting their affiliate products. Create your own blueprint to increase your affiliate sales. Think about your target audience.

Find the products they love. Create a solid revenue plan around your content so you can make money by helping your target audience.

One important thing: don’t put all your eggs in one basket.

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What do we mean by that? Don’t just depend on one traffic source like Google or one income source like affiliate marketing.

Yes, affiliate marketing can be lucrative and help you earn thousands of dollars in passive income but things can go wrong. Your might see a significant decrease in traffic overnight or your affiliate product vendor/developer might reduce affiliate commission rates.

That’s why always try to diversify your traffic and income sources to survive in the long run. That’s the ONLY reason why I’m still working full-time and earning a living from blogging even after a decade of launching BloggersPassion.

15. Learn how to outsource time-consuming tasks

Blogging is time-consuming. Affiliate marketing is time-consuming. There are a ton of tasks you should do as an affiliate marketer cum blogger.

These tasks include;

  • Content creation
  • Topic research
  • SEO
  • Email marketing
  • Social media promotion
  • Networking
  • Learning how to sell online
  • Trying new traffic and income sources and the list goes on

If you REALLY want to earn $10K+ per month from affiliate marketing, you should outsource most of the time-consuming tasks.

In fact, I also outsource the majority of the blogging related tasks including content marketing, social media promotion, Facebook ads and so on. That’s how I get MORE time to work on things that actually matter.

Here’s an incredible tip to outsource time-consuming tasks so you can focus on the actual things such as traffic generation, increasing your affiliate sales etc.

Create a team.

Yes, you need a team to outsource most of the blogging related tasks.

One for content creation, one for social media promotion, one for SEO, one for email marketing and the list goes on. Or if you’re on a tight budget, you can hire one or two people to work full-time for you.

Make sure to check their skillset (or experience) before you start working with them. That’s how I did and I always provide long-term work instead of finding a new guy every month.

So my suggestion for you is this: find someone with proper skills and work with them for a long-time (instead of just a few months). It not only develops a strong bond but it will also be helpful for both of you to earn more profits online.

Also, make sure to create a strategy. Here are the 5 essential pillars of a successful website strategy that help you increase your affiliate sales even if you’re a beginner.

  1. Content marketing strategy: Content is the king when it comes to increasing your sales online. It doesn’t matter what industry you are in, you need to create a long-form of highly useful content for your target audience to increase your affiliate sales.
  2. SEO strategy: Your keywords, content, user engagement, website speed – all come into play when it comes to developing an SEO strategy. Here’s a simple tutorial that helps you layout a great SEO strategy for your website.
  3. Email list building strategy: Just like SEO, you also need the most essential part of building a successful affiliate site which is your email list. You should figure out ways to turn random visitors of your website into leads and them into loyal subscribers. Offer freebies, give free stuff too often, do more than your competitors.
  4. Promotion strategy: Content alone won’t help you increase your affiliate sales, it’s your promotion strategy is what helps you stay ahead of your competition. It includes social media promotion, list building, guest posting for linking, and so on.
  5. Monetization strategy: Without having a monetization plan, no one can make more affiliate sales through their sites. Create a sales funnel. A blog sales funnel is what helps you turn normal visitors into email subscribers into buyers.

Lastly, we’ll wrap up this affiliate marketing beginner’s guide with an amazing quote from Larry Bussey.

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More Affiliate Marketing for Beginners Related Resources:

FAQs

What is affiliate marketing and how does it work?

Affiliate marketing is all about promoting other company’s products to earn commissions in return.
 
To get started with affiliate marketing, you need to join the relevant affiliate programs, get the unique affiliate link, and then start promoting those products using that link. For every successful customer, you refer to the company via your link, you will be getting a specific commission.

How much money can you make as an affiliate marketer?

There is no limit. There are so many affiliate marketers who are earning thousands of dollars every month.

How much can a beginner make in affiliate marketing?

Though it depends on the niche, and the efforts you put in, still as a beginner you can set a target of $1000 a month initially.  

How do I become an affiliate marketer?

To become an affiliate marketer, first, you will have to choose a niche, then a platform (Blog, YouTube, etc.), join relevant affiliate programs, create content around those programs, drive traffic to your platform, get clicks on your affiliate links and convert those clicks into sales.

How can I start affiliate marketing with no money?

To start affiliate marketing you don’t need any money as most of the affiliate programs are completely free to join.
 
Then it comes to choosing a suitable platform such as a blog, YouTube channel, or any platform where you can drive relevant traffic.

Do I need a website to be an affiliate marketer?

Though it is recommended to start a blog around your niche, it is not necessary.
 
You can do affiliate marketing on a YouTube channel, Email List, Instagram, Facebook, etc. All you need relevant traffic and send them to the company’s website through your affiliate link.

Can I become an Amazon affiliate without a website?

Yes, you can use the YouTube channel link, Facebook page, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, Pinterest, etc. to sign up for the Amazon affiliate program.

How to do affiliate marketing in the right way?

Choose the right niche, a platform (blog is highly recommended), pick the right products, make an effective content strategy, bring the relevant traffic, and make them buy the products you promote.


Final Thoughts on Affiliate Marketing for Beginners in 2024

Affiliate marketing is legit, but NOT a get quick rich scheme. So don’t expect quick results. It’s a marathon, not a sprint.

Although you don’t have to be super smart to increase your affiliate sales, you need to work extremely hard if you want to succeed.

In a nutshell, you must know how to sell to REAL people.

You can’t make that simply by promoting your products that your readers are not interested in. You have to find out their needs and wants, then promote the products that solve their problems.

So what are your thoughts about this ultimate guide around affiliate marketing for beginners? Share your thoughts in the comments.

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